A team of undergraduate students in the UNL College of Business Administration won first place at the regional Union Pacific Case Competition held April 10 at the Union Pacific Headquarters in Omaha. This was the second year Union Pacific held the competition and also included teams from Iowa State University, Kansas State University and University of Nebraska at Omaha. The competition challenged teams to take on a case that asked them to make decisions on a contract renewal with a customer through financial analyses of rate increases, guarantees, opportunity costs and more.
The winning team members are: Alex Chandler, business administration major from Adams, Nebraska; Robert Harvey, accounting and finance major from Lincoln; Justin Saegebarth, marketing major from Norfolk, Nebraska; and Brianne Steffensmeier, marketing and business administration major from Bellevue, Nebraska. In addition to the team award, Chandler won the Best Presenter Award.
Rob Simon, associate professor of practice in marketing, was the team’s faculty sponsor. He believes the competition provided a unique learning experience by utilizing what they have learned in their business courses in solving a real business problem.
“The students solved a real problem for a company in a competitive situation with real time constraints. They learned to work with a limited amount of data, where you have to make assumptions and justify those assumptions to a business manager,” Simon said. “Our students were well prepared for this competition and delivered a strong, confident presentation.”
Steffensmeier said the team brought UNL the win because of their collaborative nature.
“Our team was cohesive and utilized everyone’s strengths,” she said. “We were prepared and analytical in our discussion of solutions, used our analyses to present explanations to our recommendations and were confident in our presented solutions.”
She recommends students to put their knowledge and skills to the test and seek out opportunities like case competitions because of the direct feedback offered by business managers.
“It’s not common for a Fortune 500 company to just invite undergraduate students to compete and present real cases in front of top executives within the company,” said Steffensmeier. “This experience was invaluable because it is extremely applicable to what I’ll be doing throughout my professional career.”
The invitation to compete in the case competition is one aspect of the college’s partnership with Union Pacific Railroad. For almost 10 years, CBA has partnered with the company to offer an experiential marketing course, taught by Simon, where students work on a series of projects for the company’s managers.
Published: April 22, 2015